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Well, theft or fire are always a possibility anywhere, and I don't go as far as keeping a copy in a different physical location, nothing I have is all that important. Power surge is easy, everything is run through surge protectors, and the Mac and the external 4 bay RAID enclosure are on separate UPSs to avoid sudden power outages etc.

Well, theft or fire are always a possibility anywhere, and I don't go as far as keeping a copy in a different physical location, nothing I have is all that important. Power surge is easy, everything is run through surge protectors, and the Mac and the external 4 bay RAID enclosure are on separate UPSs to avoid sudden power outages etc.

Sounds like a nice setup. What type of drives and external enclosure are you using?

All Maxtor Drives. The external enclosure is by CoolDrives, FW 400, each drive bay has 2 fans cooling it (one in front, one in back of the tray) and two big fans in the back. The thing never gets hot. The external enclosure has 2 2 disk RAID arrays in it, one 200Gb array and one 250Gb array. The third array is internal in my G4 and is two 80Gb drives. All are Mirrored.

I'm going to upgrade the whole thing to a CoolDrives 8 Bay external, and upgrade all of the disks to 400Gb within the next 6 months or so.

All Maxtor Drives. The external enclosure is by CoolDrives, FW 400, each drive bay has 2 fans cooling it (one in front, one in back of the tray) and two big fans in the back. The thing never gets hot. The external enclosure has 2 2 disk RAID arrays in it, one 200Gb array and one 250Gb array. The third array is internal in my G4 and is two 80Gb drives. All are Mirrored.

I'm going to upgrade the whole thing to a CoolDrives 8 Bay external, and upgrade all of the disks to 400Gb within the next 6 months or so.

All Maxtor Drives. The external enclosure is by CoolDrives, FW 400, each drive bay has 2 fans cooling it (one in front, one in back of the tray) and two big fans in the back. The thing never gets hot. The external enclosure has 2 2 disk RAID arrays in it, one 200Gb array and one 250Gb array. The third array is internal in my G4 and is two 80Gb drives. All are Mirrored.

I'm going to upgrade the whole thing to a CoolDrives 8 Bay external, and upgrade all of the disks to 400Gb within the next 6 months or so.

I had never heard of cooldrives, so I looked them up. It looks like they have some good external hdd solutions. I'm guessing that you are pretty happy with them if you plan on upgrading to the 8 bay model.

I've been very happy with them so far. The only problems I have are with my Mac itself. I'm running an old Sawtooth, pretty much upgraded to the max. The old onboard FW bus gets funky every once in a while and burps on me causing the 2 RAID arrays to unmount themselves. When this happens I not only have to reboot the Mac, but the External drive too. It can get a bit tricky if I don't do it in just the right order. The other onboard FW has 3 CDRW/DVDRW drives daisy chained together. I have a USB2/FW card in a PCI slot that is driving 3 iPods (2 FW, 1 USB 2) and the fourth iPod is Daisy chained off the external drive bay.

All in all, this sometimes overwhelms my long in the tooth Mac and it starts dropping things off line, iPods, CDRW/DVDRW or RAID arrays. Ya never know how it's going to get weirded out next. Only upside it it doesn't happen often, once every couple of months. I chalk all this up to the fact that at one point I had 6 drives inside the silly thing and the temperature often reached, or exceeded, 140 degrees inside the case. That couldn't have been good for the board.

The 8 bay drive will come after I get a new Mac. Planning on picking up a Quad core G5 before the PowerMacs go Intel and get a lame name change. That could be as soon as 2 months or as much as 6 depending on finances.

Since I have a bunch of stuff for school on my PB, I have a 200GB external drive just for backups. I have folders/files that change back-uped daily, and then I have all of the files back-uped once a month, and I mean everything.

I always do a full backup of my drive every week to an external LaCie drive. I also sync with .Mac which of course preserves alot of mail, bookmark, address book, etc settings. All my photos are also at Flickr for archiving.